Reviewed by: Suad Bejtovic, Bosnian Movie Critic

Directed by: Renny Harlin

It’s the beginning of a new season in CART racing, and Beau Brandenburg (Til Schweiger) is getting ready to defend his championship title against Jimmy Blye (Kip Pardue), an up-and-coming young star who already shown signs of brilliance. However, Jimmy is feeling the pressures of the sport, the ones off track more so than those on it. He is driven by his agent and brother, Demille (Robert Sean Leonard), who’s making him nearly inaccessible to the team boss, wheel chair bound Carl Henry (Burt Reynolds). Carl is afraid the kid is losing his edge, so he calls in Joe Tanto (Sly), an aging veteran of the sport, to help the kid out. It’s a tall order at first, but we expect Sly to do the best he can, up to and including a 180mph race through the streets of Chicago. Brandenburg, on the other hand, breaks up with his girlfriend and fiancee, and by the rule of movie romances, she’ll finish in Jimmy’s arms. Combine that with the fact the guy whose spot Sly is taking on the team is married to his former wife and you have yourself not one but two love triangles with the backdrop of one of the fastest sports in the world.

First of all, Driven tries to tell us that the world these athletes live consists of two types of drivers – the two contenders, and all others who are just obstacles on the track or victims of nameless obligatory crashes. Not in the heyday of Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, when both were driving Formula One cars for McLaren team, have we had such dominance by two drivers – one of them always wins, the other either close second or a shameful DNF. Then, you don’t have to know much about open wheel cars to know that they cannot be ignited with a turn of a key, which makes the Chicago car chase sequence a little silly. But, if you forget the obvious inaccuracies, for the sake of the movie, what you get is a rather watchable product.

The one flaw of the movie is Sly’s screenplay. The fact that he spent years pitching it to studios until finally Warner Bros picked it up is much publicized. Stallone says he researched drivers, attended races, all in hopes he would understand them. Somewhere along the way, however, the story about competitive athletes gave way to special effects and they are truly amazing. Director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2) knows how to keep the action high, and with the help of computer graphics, he’s designed some astonishing sequences, most notably spectacular crashes. One of the most talked-about frames after the screening I attended was the one that shows the point of view of a driver, operating a 200-mph vehicle in the rain.